Virtual care allows physicians to care for more patients in less time and open up in-person visits for patients with more complex care needs. 

Please join us for a webinar as we discuss innovative virtual solutions that result in improved health outcomes and operational efficiency. Speakers from Zipnosis and American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) will discuss their successful partnership, where AAFP is bringing an exclusive telemedicine software platform to its members.

Speakers will share best practices in combining clinical efficiency and convenience with high-quality care through online patient interviews and video visits.

Speakers:

-Lisa Ide, MD, MPH, Chief Medical Officer, Zipnosis

-Steven Waldren, MD, MS, VP and Chief Medical Informatics Officer, American Academy of Family Physicians

State Medicaid Program Reimbursement Info: ttps://www.cchpca.org/telehealth-policy/current-state-laws-and-reimbursement-policies

5 Surprising Ways In Which Telemedicine Is Revolutionizing Healthcare

“Telehealth is not a specific service, but a collection of means to enhance care and education delivery,” says the Center for Connected Health Policy (CCHP). CCHP further classify telehealth into four types of services, live-video conferencing, mobile health, remote patient monitoring, and store-and-forward. Most telehealth platforms provide one or more of these services, to a niche patient or consumer segment.

Here are five surprising ways in which telehealth is revolutionizing healthcare.  

1. Remote elderly monitoring
2. Remote psychiatric care
3. Getting a second opinion
4. Care in remote locations
5. Redefining health insurance

The full Forbes article with details on these points can be viewed at this link.  

New dimensions in smart wearable technology

The field of wearable technologies is a novel and promising emerging area that offers a number of benefits to users and healthcare professionals alike, enabling realtime monitoring of diseases, convenience and ease of use. Professor Shuenn-Yuh Lee of the Department of Electrical Engineering at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Taiwan, is immersed in this field and working on a project called ‘Guard Patch: An intelligent wearable wireless system with IoT and biosignal acquisition’.

This area of research is becoming increasingly important given the context of a rapidly ageing population and associated considerations of the prolificacy of chronic diseases, growing awareness of cost and emphasis on the importance of health monitoring. ‘Prevention is better than cure is an important concept in healthcare,’ highlights Lee. ‘To economise on the social cost and improve the quality of medical treatment, a platform capable of examination anywhere and anytime by itself should be developed, which can transmit personal examination data to the healthcare centre or hospital via the Internet or wireless communication systems.’

This led Lee to set up a research laboratory – the Communication and Biologic Integrated Circuit (CBIC) Lab – to develop the interactive intelligent healthcare and monitoring system (IIHMS). This system includes a body sensor network (BSN) and a local sensor network (LSN), with the BSN acting as the medium of communication between the wearable devices and the portable facility, and the LSN being the intermediate medium between the portable facility and the healthcare centre.

The full report can be downloaded below.  

Negotiating Relation Work with Telehealth Home Care Companionship Technologies that Support Aging in Place

In response to a perceived caregiver shortage and need to support aging in place, telehealth home care systems are being developed to provide remote care and monitoring to older people. Tough research has examined the experiences of teleoperators delivering care through these systems, we know less about the experiences of older adults receiving this care. We report findings from a three-month study of a tablet-based telehealth home care system that provides support for aging in place. We find that there is a mismatch between the designer’s conception of how care should be delivered and the ways that participants were interested in using the system. Tis mismatch exists in four areas: participants’ interest in geting to know the human teleoperators and rejecting the virtual avatar, interrogating the interface to figure out the inner workings of the platform, pushing for a more symmetrical relationship, and negotiating the relation work that they were willing to perform in the “sacred space” of their homes. We draw on the concept of heteromation to understand the political dimensions of telehealth aging in place technologies. We also provide implications and future directions for technologies requiring relation work as well as the design of avatar-based remote companionship.

The full paper can be downloaded below.  

From second to hundredth opinion in medicine: A global consultation platform for physicians

Serious medical diagnostic errors lead to adverse patient outcomes and increased healthcare costs. The use of virtual online consultation platforms may lead to better-informed physicians and reduce the incidence of diagnostic errors. Our aim was to assess the usage characteristics of an online, physician-to-physician, no-cost, medical consultation platform, Medscape Consult, from November 2015 through October 2017. Physicians creating original content were noted as “presenters” and those following up as “responders”. During the study period, 37,706 physician users generated a combined 117,346 presentations and responses. The physicians had an average age of 56 years and were from 171 countries on every continent. Over 90% of all presentations received responses with the median time to first response of 1.5 h. Overall, computer- and device-based medical consultation has the capacity to rapidly reach a global medical community and may play a role in the reduction of diagnostic errors.

The full article can be downloaded below.  

U.S. National Health IT Week (NHIT Week) is a nationwide awareness week focused on catalyzing actionable change within the U.S. health system through the application of information and technology. Founded by HIMSS and the Institute for e-Policy in 2006, the week-long celebration is comprised of partner-driven activities and events led by the efforts of national health stakeholders. Participants range from the Administration, congressional, federal and state agencies, providers, non-profit organizations and more. Virtually, in Washington DC and beyond, National Health IT Week stakeholders collaborate towards actionable outcomes which demonstrate the power information and technology has to transform health in the U.S., and its wide-reaching global impact.

Clinic to in-home telemedicine reduces barriers to care for patients with MS or other neuroimmunologic conditions

In this survey study, analyzing experience with clinic to in-home telemedicine in our academic MS and neuroimmunology clinic, travel and caregiver burden were reduced with the convenience of televideo-enabled visits while preserving efficient and effective care in the opinion of both patients and clinicians. These results support the integration of clinic to in-home telemedicine within the continuum of MS/neuroimmunology specialty care.

The full article can be downloaded below.  

Video recording of October 1, 2018 Capitol Hill Lunch Briefing on Technologies to Address the Opioid Crisis. Hosted by Health Tech Strategies in collaboration with American Telemedicine Association, Connected Health Initiative, eHealth Initiative, Health IT NOW, and HIMSS.

Slides are available for download in eHI's resource center under Policy: https://www.ehidc.org/resources/policy 

A quick look at the UK's new National Health Service app

The National Health Service (NHS) in England is introducing a new app that will allow patients to access NHS services on their smartphones and tablets, to be gradually rolled out across the country starting from December this year.

Developed by NHS Digital and NHS England, it will be available through the App Store and Google Play for patients aged 16 and over, who will be able to use the app to access their GP records and the NHS 111 symptom checker, book appointments, order repeat prescriptions, register as organ donors and set data sharing preferences, using a single identity verification system.

The full article can be viewed at this link.